Shut up and ship

2. The main advantage of ECC is that it is generally faster than RSA, especially for security levels that would require RSA keys larger than 2048 bits.

3. It is meaningless at this time to say that ECC is unnecessarily strong compared to RSA. It is possible to match the security of ECC using RSA at every level. But, a linear increase in ECC key size requires the RSA key size to increase exponentially. For example, to match the strength of AES-128 you need a 256-bit ECC key or a 3072-bit RSA key, whereas to match the strength of AES-256 you need a 384-bit ECC key or a 15,360-bit RSA key.

Well, think about this: One major reason hash functions like sha1 aren't recommended (as opposed to, say, bcrypt) for encryption is because they are optimized for speed and so it's faster to generate lookup tables or to iteratively search for the password. So unless it's slow because the implementation itself is crappy, this might actually be a good thing after all.

It's not that there's security bugs or buffer overflows in some software. Everything has bugs and if the design and idea is good, they can usually be fixed and everything can keep moving along fine. It's that we know essentially nothing about the implementation or design of a program that asks its users to trust it to keep their traffic safe from an oppressive government. I think you'd have to be awfully naive to just take Haystack at its word that Haystack actually works.

I think that's overstating the case a tad.

Take a look again at JGC's very nice summary of the case in question:

Worryingly, Haystack's only 'technical' detail is the following: "We use state-of-the-art elliptic curve cryptography to ensure that these communications cannot be read." Fair enough, but frankly that means nothing. They could be using AES, or RSA, or pretty much any good algorithm and I still wouldn't care. Two reasons: their implementation might be rubbish and enable attacks or their cryptography might be irrelevant because another technique (traffic analysis?) might make breaking Haystack possible. After all, all the Iranian government needs is a list of people running the software.

In this specific case, having the source open would permit cryptography researchers (of sufficient skill and aptitude) to analyze whether or not Haystack is actually doing what it needs to do. Put another way: how do we know that Haystack isn't including a back door to capture all the information passing through their system, to sell on to the Iranian government for a hefty fee? We don't.

I'm not arguing that open source is inherently more secure than closed source; I'm just saying that in some specific cases, there are clear benefits to having the source available for inspection.

Spefically finding number 3: "Open Source projects have comparable security, faster remediation times, and fewer Potential Backdoors than Commercial or Outsourced software."

That's simply not true.

Open source doesn't necessarily mean it's always secure, but at least you, or someone you trust, can analyze it and find out. Maybe even fix it. Anyone that understands the domain can verifiably prove that it's secure or insecure by inspecting its inner-workings, and in the case of things like crypto, this leads to stronger and more secure implementations.

So it might not always ensure security, but it does ensure the possibility of security. As far as I'm concerned, closed-source crypto might as well be full of backdoors and easily breakable.